Organizational Consequences, Marketing Ethics, and Salesforce Supervision

Abstract

Using an experimental design, the authors explore organizational consequences and ethical issues in salesforce supervision. The findings suggest that managers’ decisions to either discipline or reward the behavior of salespeople are guided primarily by the inherent rightness or wrongness of the salespeople's behaviors (deontological considerations) and only secondarily by the consequences of the behaviors on the organization (teleological factors). The results have implications for salesforce supervision, the P-utility maximization thesis, Etzioni's moderate deontology, and the Hunt-Vitell theory of ethics.